What’s new in Xpedition 2604
The world of electronic systems design is evolving at an incredible pace. With increasing complexity, relentless time-to-market pressures, and the ever-present need for robust verification, designers need tools that not only keep up but actively push the boundaries of what’s possible. The Xpedition 2604 release brings a host of enhancements designed to streamline your workflow, improve collaboration, and ensure design integrity from concept to manufacturing.
Let’s dive into the key updates across different stages of your design process:
General improvements: Harnessing AI and optimizing the user experience
Getting started with a new product can be a time-consuming experience. With Xpedition 2604 we’ve augmented the user interface to include AI-enabled support assistance. You can ask natural language questions directly within the product and receive responses that are specific to only the product and version that you’re using. The AI model is trained on both product documentation and KB articles to provide a detailed response to any query. We expect this capability to dramatically accelerate research, much like AI has changed the way we do everyday web searches.
Systems design: Optimized definition and verification
Xpedition 2604 significantly enhances the requirements decomposition process, making it more intuitive and efficient. We’ve optimized the user experience (UX) by reorganizing tabs into multiple windows and improving the hierarchical tree view for accessing requirements. This leads to a simpler, more straightforward experience, boosting readability and overall efficiency in managing your project’s critical specifications. Ensuring all requirements are clearly defined and traceable from the outset is key to successful project outcomes.
Beyond foundational requirements, ensuring seamless connectivity between various components and boards is also crucial. Xpedition 2604 introduces significant improvements in this area with the multi-board interface signal matcher. This release offers a flexible mechanism to help system hardware engineers verify and validate interface I/O, power, and ground net names more efficiently. It’s a seamless extension of the signal manager, providing cross-board verification, even for multi-instance cards and cabling. By leveraging intelligent signal name matching and system signal name dictionaries, Xpedition 2604 helps reduce false positives and automatically detects true interface errors. This capability is crucial for reducing costly hardware errors and accelerating system interconnectivity validation.
Design capture: Performance, adaptability, and enhanced UX
The design capture phase is where ideas take shape, and Xpedition 2604 focuses on making this process more robust and user-friendly.
We’ve addressed performance issues and improved the adaptability of our supply chain solutions. The Designer supply chain client has been completely re-engineered with an improved communication method, leading to fewer connectivity issues, especially in complex IT environments. This ensures the client is accessible and reliable, boosting user satisfaction.
We’ve also improved performance to ensure a smoother, more responsive design experience, particularly for opening projects with large schematics.
For design exploration, the UX has been significantly improved. The navigator panel in Xpedition Designer now allows for the creation of core document types (like schematics, sheets, and boards) directly within the panel, eliminating discrepancies associated with sheet ordering. This enables common tasks to manage design hierarchy more quickly and naturally, boosting overall productivity.
Library and design data management: Consistency and control
Effective library and design data management are the backbone of efficient and error-free design. Xpedition 2604 continues to strengthen these foundations.
The part builder now ensures consistent symbol generation when symbol appearance and graphical properties change. It also improves batch mode by adding partitioning by pin property settings to the configuration file, offering an optimized experience based on user feedback.
Navigator UX improvements in the library manager have been implemented to make finding and managing components even more intuitive. You can now filter objects to improve discovery and navigation. There are also expand/collapse controls for navigator tree nodes for easier content exploration
Xpedition 2604 delivers significant advancements in 3D model management, allowing for more efficient handling and visualization of complex 3D models directly within the design environment. This is complemented by enhanced supply chain integration, providing better visibility and adaptability to your supply chain data.
For improved collaboration and understanding, new features support data visualization and collaboration notes. These tools enable teams to share insights, highlight critical areas, and track discussions directly within the design data, fostering a more connected and efficient design process.
For overall design and flow integration, in 2604 check-out and check-in functionalities for authoring tools are now available via EDM web, improving the user experience with a fully functional web client.
Layout: Precision, collaboration, and manufacturing readiness
The layout stage is where the physical design comes to life, and Xpedition 2604 delivers enhancements for greater precision, better collaboration, and improved manufacturing readiness.
The enhanced component explorer UX now includes “expand all” and “collapse all” options, and remembers the expansion state of the tree control between sessions, allowing quicker access to component information.
An initial validation of creepage clearances can now be done directly within the layout editor. It supports both online (net-to-net) and batch (net class-to-net class) checking, enabling an interactive workflow to address creepage distance issues earlier in the design process.
The integration of Blueprint into Xpedition for document generation is a significant highlight. This integration helps produce better instructions for manufacturing and prevents costly re-spins by providing comprehensive and accurate documentation directly from the design data. This ensures that manufacturing teams have precise, up-to-date information, minimizing errors and accelerating time to production.
Additional updates include enhanced non-functional pad clearances, improvements to the component explorer and placement planning, and complex via, physical reuse, and copy circuit enhancements.
Crucially, for DFM analysis, Xpedition 2604 now supports native IPC-4761 via type definition in its pad stack editor, enabling Valor NPI to fully integrate these types into its analysis. This improves the PCB manufacturing digital twin and optimizes the design-to-manufacturing hand-off. Furthermore, Xpedition DFM now supports team layout, enabling multi-user concurrency for running DFM checks as part of a team design session. This allows designers to run analysis on specific protected areas, promoting efficient, focused, and uninterrupted collaboration.
Design verification: Early detection and team collaboration
Catching issues early is critical for reducing costs and accelerating time to market. Xpedition 2604 bolsters design verification capabilities, particularly with integrates for schematic analysis and DFM analysis.
In addition to the DFM analyses discussed in the layout section above, for schematic analysis, the active model wizard project creator launched from Xpedition Designer has been enhanced. It can now initiate active part model creation sourced from Xpedition Designer symbols, propagating pin number, pin name, pin type, part number, and part description. This generates model building blocks, significantly reducing the time to create small to large active part models and expanding model creation actions to all parts in a schematic, where it was previously limited to passive and connector parts.
The Xpedition 2604 update is packed with features designed to empower you with greater efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration throughout your electronic design journey.
